Michael Fassbender Juggles Carl Jung, Sex Addiction and… Fluffers?

Michael Fassbender is a sex addict living in New York City in the provocative Shame.

If actor Michael Fassbender has yet to land on your radar after his eye-opening roles in films like Inglorious Basterds and Jane Eyre. Or after driving us crazy with gay subtext as Magneto in this summer’s X-Men: First Class, you won’t be able to escape him this holiday season. He has two big films coming out – A Dangerous Method and Shame.

The films couldn’t be more different from each other. A Dangerous Method is a bio-pic featuring Fassbender as Carl Jung to Keira Knightly’s Sabina Spielrein and Viggo Mortensen’s Sigmund Freud. Directed by David Cronenberg, Method is the kind of period piece that Academy members drool over, and the sexual relationship that develops between Jung and patient Spielrein becomes a major thrust, so to speak, of the film’s narrative. A Dangerous Method is currently playing in New York and Los Angeles.

In Shame, however, the contemporary story directed by Steve McQueen (who also co-wrote the script with Abi Morgan), the 34-year old Irish-German actor plays a sex addict whose New York City world gets even more out of control once his troubled sister (Carey Mulligan) comes to live with him. Due to the film’s graphic portrayal of sex, including incest, the film is being released this weekend in Los Angeles and New York with an NC-17 rating.

Fassbender wasn’t phased by the sexuality in Shame
but says he had a hard time watching the movie after.

During the recent film junket for both films in Beverly Hills, Fassbender, along with McQueen, talked about how he was able to get into the psyche of Brandon, the sex addict in Shame:

Part of my preparation, a very big part of it, is I reread the script. I might read it 300-350 times so I’m spending a lot of time with him and I’m getting to know him and then through the day I’m like ‘What would Brandon do in this scenario?’ Just little pieces that you’re gathering every day, putting it together, sitting down with it and you’re thinking ‘Is this logical?’ if it is logical, then give it a try then Steve is there to steer me in the right direction with that. But it’s sort of just trying to understand him and relate to him as opposed to this sort of judgment thing. That would be a mistake.

This is the second film that Fassbender and McQueen have collaborated on after 2008’s Hunger and the actor was happy to talk about the successful working partnership.

It’s a hard thing to put your finger on. It’s a chemistry that I’m very, very grateful [for] and feel so blessed that I’ve come across it because it is something, for me for sure, I was always looking for, a collaborator…Hunger was a big break for me, it was [McQueen’s] first movie so together we were experiencing a lot and I could see on Steve’s face the passion and wanting to get it right and I wanted to get it right, too. We just found a language very quickly and it was kind of like when we started Shame it was like we’d just walked off the set of Hunger and onto that. Really, it was amazing.

Director Steve McQueen (r) working with actors Fassbender (l)
and Carey Mulligan (center) on the Shame set.

Due to the sexual nature of the story and the overt sexuality, including nudity, that Fassbender has to portray, how did the director take that into consideration on the set? McQueen, who was also present at the junket, explained…

From the catering to makeup to hair to the camera department to sound department, electricians, grips, gaffers…you have to create an atmosphere where everyone knows each other…great actors like Michael, if I may be so bold to say, they’re like thoroughbred racehorses. They come into the room and sense if something is wrong, they sense if there’s some kind of difficulty so you create an environment which is safe to take risks; that’s what one has to do. It starts from the bottom up and everyone has to be involved. Any great or interesting actor has to be in a space where they feel safe in order to do what they have to do. That’s what it is. It really is that simple but everyone is involved.

Fassbender jokingly added there was one other way that he was able to stay in character for the sex scenes in Shame: “We had a lot of fluffers around!”